Michael Dirda (born 1948), a Fulbright Fellowship recipient, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic for the Washington Post.

• 1 Career
• 2 Works
• 3 Family
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 6 External links

Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree, Dirda took a Ph.D. from Cornell University in comparative literature. In 1978 Dirda started writing for the Washington Post; in 1993 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism. Currently, he is a book critic for the Post.

Two collections of Dirda''s literary journalism have been published:

• Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-253-33824-7

• Bound to Please (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005) ISBN 0-393-05757-7

He has also written:

• An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003) ISBN 0-393-05756-9 (autobiography)

• Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2005) ISBN 0-8050-7877-0

• Classics for Pleasure (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007) ISBN 0-15-101251-2

• On Conan Doyle; or, The Whole Art of Storytelling (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) ISBN 0-691-15135-0

On Conan Doyle was awarded the 2012 Edgar Award in the Best Critical/Biographical category. (Reviewer Darrell Schweitzer lauds the book in The New York Review of Science Fiction.)

Dirda lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, Marian Peck Dirda, a prints and drawings conservator at the National Gallery of Art. They have three sons: Christopher (b. 1984), Michael (b. 1987), and Nathaniel (b. 1990).